CodePen

I’m so envious of Paul Hebert’s Generating Random Mazes with JavaScript. Paul designed a random maze generator in some pretty easy to reason about JavaScript. It’s on CodePen, naturally. I’m envious because I love mazes. I’d draw them constantly as a kid. The square corner ones or weird wobbly organ... read more

Kristen’s classification of the four eras of JavaScript frameworks feels intuitively correct. A further simplification is essentially: 1. jQuery 2. Backbone 3. React 4. Next.js. Those were the big names from the eras and the similar technologies feel like obvious siblings. It’s easy to point at shor... read more

Sometimes a good ol’ list is what we need. I know, I know, this is forever true. But as my friend Dave is wont to say: eliminate nuance. The world doesn’t need nuance on if you should label your inputs by matching the for attribute of the label with the id of the input. You […]... read more

Let’s do CSS stuff this week. Why not — kinda my thing. Did you know Alvaro Montoro has a whole site of comics on the subject of CSS? There is a lot of satire in there, which I really enjoy. So they changed CSS nesting a bit. I heard that the usage of it was […]... read more

I love the little typographic thing where if you’re reading a block of text that is in italics, that when an italic word is needed within that, it is unitalicized (like that). I’ve seen that expressed in CSS like: That’s probably smart to have, but not all italics are necessarily within an <em&gt... read more

If you were in charge of the curriculum at a college teaching web development, would you ensure the curriculum was regularly updated with bleeding edge technology? Or would you establish a slower moving curriculum with tried and true technologies? That’s tough. You can’t just flip a coin. It may be ... read more

I was mystified the other day about why some navigational View Transitions weren’t working for me. It was just a demo thing, so it wasn’t a big deal, not to mention this API is Chrome-only and just a progressive enhancement anyway. But I did learn why! The way I understand it now is that navigation ... read more

A little bit ago David Darnes made a <code-pen> web component that you’d chuck HTML, CSS, and JS inside of and it would show the code and give you an “Open in CodePen” button. That’s enabled by our Prefill API. Miriam Suzanne has played with web components making an <embed-pen> that is l... read more

“Regardless of where it is in the DOM.” That’s a phrase that goes through my mind in regard to a number of new CSS features and it’s so cool. I certainly spent most of my formative HTML & CSSin’ years being very careful about where things needed to go in the DOM specifically because CSS […]... read more

Recently Heikki Lotvonen cooked up a very cool idea: what if the colorization of code output on the web could be handled by the font itself. Syntax highlighting, as it were. So rather than accomplish this with a heaping pile of <span>s with classes to colorize the text, the font file knows how... read more